Live Nation have said that governing body The Royal Parks were expecting too much money to renew the tender to stage large-scale concerts at Hyde Park from 2013 to 2017.
The promoters had been holders of the Hyde Park tender for the past 15 years but have since lost the account.
Speaking on the loss, John Probyn, chief operating officer of Live Nation told NME that the park was London's Madison Square Garden, but now “no promoter could go in and decently run a gig” for the amount The Royal Parks offered.
"I'm not prepared to go on as a loss maker. Maybe someone is going in and do something like Latitude: that may be more aesthetically pleasing to the park but [the promoter is] not going to make money out of that.
“The only way you’re going to do it is putting on big headline acts, selling a lot of tickets at quite a high ticket level." Probyn explained.
"[The Royal Parks] are public servants, so they're not allowed to say [that it was money], but it doesn’t take a genius to work out what they wanted," he added before suggested that Hyde Park's reputation may have been damaged as far as promoters are concerned.
"People always see the promoters as the greedy guys who take the money. Trust me, at Hyde Park we didn’t," he said, although the NME said Probyn declined to give numbers. "It was our flagship venue. Hyde Park was our Madison Square Garden," he added. "The venue, the name… everybody wants to play there. Everyone did want to play there; the problem with that now is that they don’t want to play there, because of the adverse publicity it’s got."
Since losing the bid, Live Nation are now looking for different venues for key events including Wireless festival in 2013. "There’s a little project that’s been bubbling away for a while and I’m really excited about it. It’s within London, but it's completely different to Hyde park," says Probyn.
It has not been revealed which promoters will pick up the tender from next year.
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